PhD Thesis Proposal
Arun Venkatraman
Carnegie Mellon University

Training Strategies for Time Series: Learning for Filtering and Reinforcement Learning

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Data driven approaches to modeling time-series are important in a variety of applications from market prediction in economics to the simulation of robotic systems. However, traditional supervised machine learning techniques designed for i.i.d. data often perform poorly on these sequential problems. This thesis proposes that time series and sequential prediction, whether [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Jennifer King
Carnegie Mellon University

Robust Rearrangement Planning using Nonprehensile Interaction

Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: As we work to move robots out of factories and into human environments, we must empower robots to interact freely in unstructured, cluttered spaces. Humans do this easily, using diverse, whole-arm, nonprehensile actions such as pushing or pulling in everyday tasks. These interaction strategies make difficult tasks easier and impossible tasks [...]

RI Seminar
Ashish Kapoor
Senior Researcher
Microsoft Research, Redmond

Safe and Optimal Path Planning in Uncertain Skies

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Ashish Kapoor is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond. Currently, his research focuses on Aerial Informatics and Robotics with an emphasis on building intelligent and autonomous flying agents that are safe and enable applications that can positively influence our society. The research builds upon cutting edge research in machine intelligence, [...]

VASC Seminar
Min Xu
Assistant Research Professor
Carnegie Mellon University

Molecular resolution structural pattern mining inside single cells

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1507Bio: Dr. Min Xu is an Assistant Research Professor of Computational Biology at the Computational Biology Department in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received degrees in Computational Biology, Computer Science, and Applied Mathematics. He has more than 16 years of research experience in various Computational [...]

RI Seminar
Umamaheswar Duvvuri, MD
Assistant Professor of Otolaryngology
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

Surgical Robotics- past, present and future

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Umamaheswar Duvvuri, MD, PhD, is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania obtaining his Medical Degree in 2000 and his PhD in Biophysics in 2002. He completed an internship in General Surgery in 2003 and residency training in Otolaryngology in 2007 at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He completed fellowship [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Venkatraman Narayanan
Carnegie Mellon University

Deliberative Perception

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: A recurrent and elementary machine perception task is to localize objects of interest in the physical world, be it objects on a warehouse shelf or cars on a road. In many real-world examples, this task entails localizing specific object instances with known 3D models. For example, a warehouse robot equipped with [...]

RI Seminar
Stefanie Tellex
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Brown University

Learning Models of Language, Action and Perception for Human-Robot Collaboration

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Stefanie Tellex is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Assistant Professor of Engineering at Brown University. Her group, the Humans To Robots Lab, creates robots that seamlessly collaborate with people to meet their needs using language, gesture, and probabilistic inference, aiming to empower every person with a collaborative robot. She [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Greydon Taylor Foil
Carnegie Mellon University

Efficiently Sampling from Underlying Physical Models

Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: The capability and mobility of exploration robots is increasing rapidly, yet missions will always be constrained by one main resource: time. Time limits the number of samples a robot can collect, sites it can analyze, and the availability of human oversight, so it is imperative the robot is able to make [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Michael Shomin
Carnegie Mellon University

Navigation and Physical Interaction with Balancing Robots

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: This work describes methods for advancing the state of the art in mobile robot navigation and physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI). An enabling technology in this effort is the ballbot, a person-sized mobile robot that balances on a ball. This underactuated robot presents unique challenges in planning, navigation, and control; however, it [...]